Waiting for the Galactic Bus (32 page)

“Or your children to the world,” Barton finished. “Charity is a great deal more intelligent than you. A son of hers could be quite gifted in beneficial ways. On the other hand, growing up under your benevolent influence, these gifts...” The beleaguered Lord of Creation let the obvious point dangle. “For Charity to put you aside as a reasoned act of will or even simple good taste was too risky in a place like Plattsville, where people pair at disastrous random for lack of wider choice.”

“What are you trying to lay on me?” Roy sputtered. “You ain’t neither one of you what you say. Look, I ain’t dumb. You saw me on TV. You saw how they loved me. They fuckin
loved
me. I raised my hand and changed everything.”

Coyul wandered to the piano, running a scale. “We do crowd scenes well.”

“No.” Barion shook his head. “He doesn’t believe it. He can’t. Like higher math to that monkey at the water hole. His whole cosmos is drama, magic, fable. A vision of Christ and Salvation awash with melodrama, God as a white man, himself as hero. Minorities for villains. But he’s going to believe it.”

Barion rose deliberately and stood over Roy. “You’re going to. Charity saw the truth when she was ready for it. But you, little man, you’re going on cold. Coyul?”

Coyul ran an arpeggio into a Gershwin phrase. “I did this with a snake once. Ready or not, Mr. Stride — it’s magic time.”

His tormentors shimmered, dissolved to pure white light, became one glow as they flowed toward, into and through Roy. The last thing he clearly remembered was an instant of euphoria as that light became limitless understanding and infinite vision.

He was pure mind, pulsing in space, no division between sight and comprehension. He saw the solar system, then the galaxy dreaming through its eon-slow revolution. His view pulled back and back to encompass the unimaginably vast, wheeling universe, video-split with the movement of atoms within a molecule. Clear, painful intellect himself, he saw everything Coyul or Barion had ever seen — worlds men would not contact for thousands of years, if ever. Civilizations, concepts of God undreamable by humans. He knew horrors beyond simple brutality or destruction, complex beauties, a peace in being one with the universe, and the loneliness of being inexpressibly small, apart and insignificant.

Roy heard and understood languages whose simplest concept strained his mind to tortured sentience, heard music of a sublime, limpid simplicity. He observed the rise, flourishing and decline of noble and brutish races, watched them voyage out into space with the same greedy wonder as savages pushing log canoes toward the plunder of a neighboring island. Time spooled out, an endless film strip of still frames to which his hurtling consciousness gave the illusion of movement. Light-years, light-millenniums, light-eons. More galaxies and more beyond them, to worlds still forming, cooling, thunderous with the struggles of small-brained monsters that knew only hunger and rage.

Time and again the nascent worlds; time and again, given the narrow conditions of climate and distance from a sun, inevitably there rose one creature, manlike or utterly alien, racked for one moment/millennium with the terror and beauty of self-knowledge, drawn onward ever after, unable to retreat. And worlds beyond these, but nowhere an end. Nothing that glorified Roy Stride, nowhere a destiny in his size begun in the writings of a people he despised, attaining dramatic close in a crucifixion, endlessly vindicated in the violence of men like himself — none at least without a pathetic ending. Myriads like him came to power, shadows on film as his mind sped across time, rose, conquered, added their madness to the rubble spinning between the worlds, then died reviled or forgotten. Or worse, lampooned, made a sad or faintly ridiculous footnote in the dry histories of aberration.

Roy’s cry of horror filled the universe, more horrible for the indifferent silence that swallowed it up. He wept with double pity, for himself and a knowledge of tragedy too huge for expression; whimpered in his smallness and fear, shrieked through the soundless void —

— put his hands to his face, shattered in the chair while the Devil played Gershwin and God spoke quietly to him.

“So much for the universal. Not much from your point of view. No MGM cosmos to answer the subjective hungers of your life. No denouement where God’s lost will is found in the chimney naming you the Pure White Chosen One. Only worlds beyond worlds and a chance to understand in a place where death comes to all, even Coyul and I.” The brothers exchanged a look of profound weariness. “After several hundred million years, that’s not horror but relief.”

“One tires of repetition,” said Coyul at the piano.

“But what’s it
mean,”
Roy cried, agonized. “What is it for?”

“Not for anything. It exists.”

Roy glared from one to the other. “I wanta go home. You said I could go home.”

“You can.” Barion nodded. “But there’s a catch.”

“Neat but nasty.” Coyul struck an ominous minor chord.

“You’ll remember everything, Roy. You’ll see everything you were or wanted for its pointlessness, understand every motive for its cowardice and frailty. You’ll know.”

“Everything I just seen?” Roy faltered. “I gotta live with that?”

“You got it: everything. You won’t know a day, an hour, a minute without that burden. You’re not any more intelligent than you were, just more informed and defenseless against honesty. You’ll spin out your life in an ordinary job with an ordinary wife dim enough to think you a blessing, until your kidneys or your heart fail or your cells begin to ad-lib with cirrhosis or cancer. You’ll always know the meaning of what you’ve seen but never be able to express or accept it.”

“It’s —” Roy broke off, wincing as something happened in his head, like parts of his brain stretching to touch others. “It’s insane.”

“Oh, not as bad as all that.” Coyul polished off “’Swonderful “with a flourish and bounced up, shooting his cuffs meticulously. “There’s the good side. Allow me, Barion?”

“Please do. I wouldn’t want our hero to think us inhumane.”

“You can always come back Below Stairs — permanently this time — with no unpleasant memories at all,” the Prince of Darkness offered. “No strings, even a Drumm to support you, armies of illusions to hail you, inexhaustible minorities to massacre, mountains of architecture to express your magnificence. Even Florence Bird to defile you cheerfully on demand, since you seem to need that. They won’t be real but you won’t know that — except now and then, perhaps, in dreams you’ll never quite remember.”

“Or quite forget,” Barion finished reminiscently. “You’re the underside of my errors. Char Stovall is what I meant by human.”

“Which reminds me. Will you excuse me?” Coyul appealed to his brother. “I’ve grown very fond of the lass. Like to take her home myself.”

“By all means, but don’t dawdle. There’s Sorlij and Maj.”

“Dear Sorlij. Lovely Maj.” Coyul’s smile was small and cryptic. “We’ll have to deal with them, won’t we?
Auf Wiedersehen,
Mr. Stride.” Coyul glowed, sparkled and was gone. Barion turned back to business, unpleasant as it was. “Well, Roy?”

“
It ain’t fair
.”

“No, it ain’t. But that’s the deal.”

Still numbed by the horror of the indifferent universe, Roy felt himself lifted out of the chair and set on his feet before the huge man who was close as he’d ever get to God.
Why you gotta be so big? Why do you always get to look down on me? Son of a bitch, you done that all my life.

“Size is irrelevant,” Barion noted casually, shrinking and modifying to a new appearance — shorter than Roy, dark as Moonlight Jones. “You dig it better this way, white boy?”

The rage dimmed Roy’s mind, blotting out even the fear. Even though he knew why the red sickness boiled up in him and that the black man was only a cartoon of his own fear, his fists balled around the hate. Roy sprang at the figure.

“You black mother —

    34   

The catsup factor

— over and over again, Leon screaming about judgment and efficiency, Roy grabbing for fat Florence. Woody pushed her down behind a table and landed between her and the bomb just as it went off. God, the blast hit Woody all over and leaked through like a sieve
Woody, Woody, don’t die for real.
And then, with his mouth close to hers, he simply kissed it to shut her up.

“Who’s dead? It’s catsup.”

“Catsup.” Her ears still rang from the explosion, too numbed to be sure she heard him right.

“And fake blood. It’s all bullshit, Char. Just a little messy.”

“Catsup...”

Charity sighed, close to waking. If Roy was the biggest asshole ever born, Woody was the biggest clown, with a nice kind of crazy in him. If she saw all this on the Late Show —

“Wouldn’t believe it...” Charity’s head lolled the other way on the seat, jolted by movement. She opened her eyes. Dark outside, shadows and fog blurring past the cab windows. She recognized the back of Jake’s head, cap perched at a familiar angle. “Jake?”

Someone was holding her hand. “Well, Char?”

She blinked hard, rubbed the last sleep-fuzz from her eyes. “Simmy?”

“Even he. How goes it?”

“Don’t know.” Her stomach felt definitely odd. Misty limbo streamed by the car windows at great speed. “Where are we?”

“Almost to Plattsville,” Jake tossed over his shoulder.

She tried to grasp the fact but failed, though one question formed itself loud and clear. “Simnel, where’s Woody? What happened to him?”

“Waiting for you in McDonald’s. I suppose I should clarify,” Simnel offered in his kindly/careful manner. “The good news is, you’re not dead.”

“Not...” No, that couldn’t be. “But I saw. I saw in the motel —”

Simnel looked slightly embarrassed. “Shameless special effects.”

“I had a heart attack —”

“Real as the blood on your dress.”

Dear old Simmy — laying a bolt of lightning on her in the same meticulous way he served champagne and strawberries. Charity was a very practical girl; she reacted in character.
“That’s
why my stomach feels weird: I’m hungry.” The backlash was swift and predictable. “Simmy, what the hell is going on?”

From the driver’s seat, Jake reproved gently: “That’s no way to speak to the Prince.”

That took a moment to sink in before Charity rejected it. No way. She remembered the horned nightmare who got her number at the White Rose. “You are the —”

“Prince will do,” Simnel/Coyul suggested. “We keep it nondenominational. As for Simnel: from Lambert Simnel, another pretender. I wanted to look after you personally; you were very important to me.”

“Thank you,” said Charity, a little abashed. “You were a nice butler.”

“We try to make it fun.” Coyul nodded to the compliment. “Now and again things turn serious. Roy was serious. That’s the bad news. He’s not dead, either.”

Charity struggled to comprehend, battling the last tatters of deep-rooted superstition.” But the — “She made vague pantomimic allusion to claws, horns and the unspeakable Damocles. They were exactly what she would have expected to see dying in sin. But that seemed a very long time ago. She could far more readily believe in plump little Simmy in his pinstripe suit, even liked the muted paisley tie.

“The night we abducted you,” Coyul explained, “you were about to make a ruinous pact with your own scruples and marry Roy.”

“No, I wouldn’t” she denied vehemently. “I don’t even hate him anymore. I don’t feel anything for Roy but sad.”

“You would have married him,” Coyul was gently certain. “This is Plattsville.”

“Just passed the city limits,” Jake put in. Charity began to recognize houses and streets through the thinning mist.

“And here in Plattsville, there weren’t that many options open to you.”

No,
she refused stubbornly
. I would have seen through him. I would’ve picked Woody.

“In time, perhaps,” Coyul answered her thought casually. “After the white dress, the wedding, the years and the children. One of whom would have been bright as you but tending to his father’s failings. What Roy did with shadows Below Stairs, his son — the seething product of his ignorance and your inevitable frustration — could very well perpetrate here in a country susceptible to charismatic charlatans as a dog to fleas.”